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Witness to Michael Hastings Car Crash Shares His Story

The Young Turks has an interview with the sole witness to journalist Michael Hastings’ fatal car crash. Hastings had told associates that he was working on a huge story before he died and in a mass email said that the feds were questioning his friends. Should we start a pool on how long it’ll be before Mr. Rubalcava suffers a motor-vehicular “accident” of his own?

We need Mythbuster Grant Imahara to rig a similar car with radio control and crash it into a palm tree to see if a single car can produce multiple explosions like this one. Apparently these Mercedes are little more than rolling firework displays.

donfarkas

Researchers at the University of Washington and University of Calif., San Diego reportedly demonstrated in 2010 that with physical access to a car’s electronic Engine Control Unit (ECU), a hacker could “adversarially control a wide range of automotive functions and completely ignore driver input, including disabling the brakes, selectively braking individual wheels on demand, stopping the engine, and so on.” They were able to do this remotely using wireless radio signals. Researchers at the University of South Carolina and Rutgers University were also able to similarly activate a wireless tire pressure sensor hazard light inside of a vehicle remotely, without even gaining physical access to its ECU, by using inexpensive radio equipment.

Physical access to a car’s ECU can apparently be easily achieved by simply plugging laptops or other miniaturized processors into the federally mandated On-Board Diagnostic Ports (OBD-II Ports) that are now located under the dash of virtually all modern vehicles. An outside operator with another laptop having a wireless link to the laptop or processor plugged into the OBD-II Port could then remotely override or change the programming of the ECU. Some ECU’s are, in fact, specifically designed to even allow a remote operator to have overriding control of various vehicle functions and programming just by means of using special cell phone transmissions.

The ECU’s were first introduced in the 1970’s as a means to boost fuel efficiency but have now become integrated into virtually every aspect of a car’s functioning and diagnostic including throttle, brakes, transmission, climate control, lights, entertainment, blue tooth enabled devices and communication systems, etc. Some have asserted that current ECU design safeguards and legal requirements to prevent malicious hacking are not adequate to provide reasonable security considering the potential risks.

It may be noteworthy in this regard that Hastings’ car was videotaped traveling at a very high rate of speed through a red light at a major intersection without slowing down, just a couple of blocks from the crash site and very shortly before the crash. A witness to the crash that ultimately happened just a couple of minutes later indicated that Hastings’ car similarly hit a median when plowing through a different nearby intersection (at Melrose), also without apparently slowing, causing it to bounce up and down a few times on the pavement, before appearing to go out of control and swerving into another median (on Highland Avenue) where it crashed into a tree.

BuzzCoastin

my first thought when reading about this guy’s death was
Gary Webb

no question he was offed by the people he offed
no question they will get away with it

Images of the vehicle appear to show more damage to the rear, around the
area of the fuel tank, than the front, leading to speculation that a
car bomb which ignited the fuel could have been responsible for the
incident.

DavidKNZ

From “The Operators” by Michael Hastings, Page 64

Dave came up to me. “You’re not going to Fuck us, are you?”
I answered what I always answer: “I’m going to write a story; some of the stuff you’ll like, some of the stuff you probably won’t like.”

Jake came up to me. “Well hunt you down and kill you if we don’t like what you write,” he said. “C. will hunt you down and kill you.”

I looked at Jake. He had what I’d heard people in the military call retired colonel syndrome. A certain inferiority complex and bitterness about not rising to the rank of general.

“Well, I get death threats like that about once a year, so no worries.” I wasn’t that disturbed by the claim. Whenever I’d been reporting around groups of dudes whose job it was to kill people, one of them would usually mention that they were going to kill me. I went outside to have a cigarette.

Duncan joined me. How’s things, old chap?” “Pretty good; this is really cool. By the way, Jake just threatened to kill me.” Duncan’s face dropped. “What?” “No, no worries, dude, I took it as a joke, and it’s not the ﬁrst time.”
“He should not have said that,” Duncan said. “’Ihat’s not how to deal with the press.”